With all the hoopla and whoop-de-do connected with Portland's Rose
Festival, you'd think the name Mary Drain Albro would pop up prominently
most every year.

But it hasn't for years, which is odd because
if ever there was an ardent advocate of roses in Portland and Oregon, it
was Albro.

And not just any roses.

Her devotion was to
hardy specimens that survived the arduous journey across the Oregon
Trail or around Cape Horn, were mostly impervious to insects and plant
diseases and, left to survive on their own, thrived for decades,
centuries even.

Pioneer roses, as she called them, came to
Oregon before statehood arrived in 1859, for the most part nurtured
along the way by women who wanted to bring with them a bit of beauty to
adorn their new homes. Those species and later similar imports are also
called heritage or antique roses.

Albro's passion for roses
sprang from her pioneer heritage. She was born May 5, 1874, in Drain,
southwest of Cottage Grove, granddaughter of the town's founder and
namesake, Charles Drain, who brought his family to Oregon in 1852.

She
went to San Francisco around age 18 to study nursing and in 1904 became
the first graduate nurse employed by the Multnomah County Hospital. She
later ran her own hospital in Myrtle Point. She married timber cruiser
Frank O. Albro there in 1914, and they lived there until his death in
1929.

She moved to Portland and was shortly elected president of
the Sons and Daughters of Oregon Pioneers, organized in 1901, and
served several terms as president. She also began her campaign in the
interest of antique roses.

In 1935, she was named superintendent
of Champoeg Park, at the time overseen by an independent commission.
Controversy over her style ensued and she lost that job when it became a
state park a year or so later.

Undaunted, in 1936, she launched
the Pioneer Rose Association. She and her recruits undertook to track
down all the roses that had arrived before. They traveled the state far
and wide and identified 23 varieties, including the famous Lee Mission
Rose.

"She really was the association, was the driving force
behind it," says Laura King of the Northwest Rose Historians. "Without
her, there wouldn't have been that organization."

Albro not only found the plants, she pursued the stories behind them.

View full sizeRob Finch/The Oregonian/fileThere is more than one Rose Garden in Portland. The Rose Garden at Peninsula Park in North Portland is photographed early one June morning.

An
oft-repeated tale of her ardor is the time she went after a cutting
from a bush sprawling "luxuriantly over the sagging beams of (a) pioneer
cabin," according to a 1939 version by Fred M. White in The Oregonian.
Her mission disturbed some piglets secreted beneath the bower, and an
angry mama pig undertook to chase away the intruder.

Albro,
"clutching her prize ... takes to her heels (and) just does reach a
boundary fence with the furious sow in hot pursuit, and is up and over
in the nick of time," White wrote.

"Quite a feat for a 50-something lady," added a 1995 version in The Seattle Times.

King
says Albro wasn't above embellishing her stories. She's quoted as
saying of some of her roses, "Their histories may not be pure but the
stories are good."

Only the Lone
Fir garden still exists. One of the Pioneer Rose Association's first
projects was to enter a float in the Rose Festival's Grand Floral
Parade. It placed first in the club division.

King says Albro
grew thousands of roses from cuttings she collected and oversaw single
plantings in any number of places. The association disbanded after 13
years, and by the time Albro died in December 1962, "she could see her
work beginning to disappear. Her heritage roses and gardens were dug up,
replanted with modern roses or left to perish from neglect."

Northwest
Rose Historians is working to remedy that. It has taken part in recent
plantings at Pacific University and the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland,
and has joined in preserving the Lone Fir garden. More such projects are
planned.

Albro's name is among those honored on the wall at the Walk of the Heroines on the Portland State University campus.